Cowley County, Kansas

• Income gap: Households earn meaningfully less than the national median, which directly affects retail demand, housing absorption, and tax base.
• Below the state median: Median household income runs $16,397 (22.1%) under the Kansas median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 9.9% below the national average, so the nominal median of $57,878 is worth $64,238 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at state level, not county level.
• Elevated poverty: At 14.3%, the rate is in economically distressed territory and supports federal funding narratives (CDFI, NMTC, EDA).
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 11.2 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 3,668 workers (47.7% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $68,886. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 3,522 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $1.7B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Construction averages $81,260 while Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation averages $12,475, a 6.5x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Food Manufacturing concentrates at 12.12x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 8 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 62.7% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: goods manufacturing. Read the count as depth within that single demand base rather than as spread across separate ones.

• Affordable market: Home value to income ratio of 2.1x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• Elevated vacancy: 14.6% of housing units are vacant, above the Kansas rate of 9.2%, and down from 16.5% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 80.2% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 7.4%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 9.1% of the vacant stock, or 1.3% of all housing units against the 14.6% headline vacancy rate. Absorbable supply for an incoming employer is thin, and the gap between the two is the redevelopment and conversion opportunity.
• Affordable rent tiers: 2 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $34,033 can pay without cost burden (~$851/mo), and 45.5% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Low participation: 57.8% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 2.9% between 2019 and 2024, from 16,286 to 15,815.
• Short commutes: 21.1-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 2 institutions in Cowley County award 1,226 credentials a year. Employers drawing from a wider labor shed should read this alongside institutions outside the county, which this page does not aggregate.

Cowley County shows strong potential for food manufacturing attraction, with a 12.12x concentration and 1,554 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally.

Most of the employment across the concentrated sub-sectors traces back to a single source of demand. Goods manufacturing accounts for 62.7% of it, with food manufacturing the largest single sub-sector at 48.9%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.